The new MacBook Air M1

When the lockdown started last year in March it meant many changes. For one thing we ended up working from home and learning from home for the kids. The oldest one had to follow on line classes and do homework. This meant that my MacBook Pro changed ‘owner’. Where I was using it before for myself when the desktop was in use by other family members it now was kind of constantly in use by my daughter. As this was really bought as an entry model laptop it had the base 128Gb configuration in terms of harddisk space. I soon found out that having multiple accounts on this machine was too much for this harddisk. At first I thought I could move apps to an usb drive and launch them from there. Technically this worked well but it seems I was the only one that could work that way and when I was doing something on the desktop someone would come, laptop in hand to ask to use the desktop for a moment because of some software not being available. Then the new M1 based machines came out and this was a nice opportunity/excuse to buy one. Which I did last month. I still had to clean up the MacBook Pro, remove accounts and so one, install some Intego software for safety etc. and I was not in a hurry and busy with unimportant other things. Until yesterday, when a call came that my son had to stay home the rest of the week and get tested because of a high risk contact on the bus. As the daughter is also still half of the time learning from home we needed to get the second laptop up and running fast. But this is the beauty of Mac OS, it probably took me an hour max to create all the user accounts, log them in with their apple id’s, set up touch id and install the immediately needed software. No hick ups, most annoying in the whole process is the need to have a second device around for each user because of the 2 factor authentication setup. Now that I finally managed to spend an hour to get the system going I am curious to find out how it runs. One thing I already like less is the standard background of Big Sur, really ugly and a major step back compared to one of Catalina.